Homing spread: Community home-based multi-copy routing in mobile social networks

Abstract—A mobile social network (MSN) is a special delay tolerant network (DTN) composed of mobile nodes with social characteristics. Mobile nodes in MSNs generally visit community homes frequently, while other locations are visited less frequently. We propose a novel zero-knowledge MSN routing algorithm, homing spread (HS). The community homes have a higher priority to spread messages into the network. Theoretical analysis shows that the proposed algorithm can spread a given number of message copies in an optimal way when the inter-meeting times between any two nodes and between a node and a community home follow exponential distributions. We also calculate the expected delivery delay of HS. In addition, extensive simulations are conducted. Results show that community homes are important factors in efficient message spreading. By using homes to spread messages faster, HS achieves a better performance than existing zero-knowledge MSN routing algorithms, including Epidemic, with a given number of copies, and Spray&Wait. Index Terms—Community home, mobile social networks (M-SNs), routing. I

TOUR: Time-sensitive Opportunistic Utility-based Routing in Delay Tolerant Networks

Abstract—In this paper, we propose a time-sensitive utility model for delay tolerant networks (DTNs), in which each message has an attached time-sensitive benefit that decays over time. The utility of a message is the benefit minus the transmission cost incurred by delivering the message. This model is analogous to the postal service in the real world, which inherently provides a good balance between delay and cost. Under this model, we propose a Time-sensitive Opportunistic Utility-based Routing (TOUR) algorithm. TOUR is a single-copy opportunistic routing algorithm, in which a time-sensitive forwarding set is maintained for each node by considering the probabilistic contacts in DTNs. By forwarding messages via nodes in these sets, TOUR can achieve the optimal expected utilities. We show the outstanding performance of TOUR through extensive simulations with several real DTN traces. To the best of our knowledge, TOUR is the first utility-based routing algorithm in DTNs. Index Terms—Delay tolerant networks, opportunistic routing, utility. I